Description of problem:
This was seen on RHEL 5 x86_64 but may also happen on RHEL 4.
#rpm -q rhpl
rhpl-0.194.1-1
[root@test01-svm ~]# python
>>> import rhpl.ethtool as ethtool
>>> ethtool.get_module("eth0")
Traceback (most recent call last):
IOError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported
Applications need to use get_module to determine if certain interfaces are bridges. This works as expected for x86.

There's a separate python-ethtool package which has different/more/better(?) bits. And the same is true for basically everything included in rhpl.
rhpl as a dumping ground has got to die. People just wrote stuff, stuck it in rhpl and then weren't interested in maintaining it. So I've started filing bugs with patches for different classes of things requiring rhpl; first set was last week, next will probably be this week.